My goal is to inform potential law school students and applicants of the ugly realities of attending law school. DO NOT ATTEND UNLESS: (1) YOU GET INTO A TOP 8 LAW SCHOOL ON SCHOLARSHIP; (2) YOU GET A FULL-TUITION SCHOLARSHIP TO ATTEND; (3) YOU HAVE EMPLOYMENT AS AN ATTORNEY SECURED THROUGH A RELATIVE OR CLOSE FRIEND; OR (4) YOU ARE FULLY AWARE BEFOREHAND THAT YOUR HUGE INVESTMENT IN TIME, ENERGY, AND MONEY DOES NOT, IN ANY WAY, GUARANTEE A JOB AS AN ATTORNEY OR IN THE LEGAL INDUSTRY.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Law School Pigs Debate Whether Getting Into Law School is Too Damn Easy

Setting the Stage: On September 24, 2015, the New York Times featured a discussion in the opinion section, labeled “Is the Bar Too Low to Get Into Law School?” The pieces were furnished by four academics and one legal practitioner. We will focus on the arguments of two of these “educators.”

Jerome Organ of the University of St. Thomas: In his article, “Incoming Law Students Have Weaker Credentials,” Organ admits that ABA-accredited commodes are admitting morons:

“[B]eginning in 2011, there also has been a continuing decline in the median LSAT scores of each entering class of law students.

This is probably a response to the weakened economy. Starting in 2011, with increased transparency about employment outcomes, it became clear that there were more law graduates than there were law jobs. That knowledge appears to have led many prospective law students to reassess whether the investment of time and money in a legal education made sense.

But for reasons that are hard to document empirically, graduates of elite colleges and universities with strong LSAT scores (who would likely still get good jobs upon graduation) have not been drawn to law school. Meanwhile, graduates of less elite schools, with weaker LSAT scores, have continued to enroll. Thus, law schools not only have enrolled fewer students over the last few years, they have also enrolled students with weaker test credentials.” [Emphasis mine]

Organ makes some excellent points. However, he fails to consider that many graduates of top college$ and univer$itie$ are typically bright enough to realize that the U.S. lawyer job market is GLUTTED – without having to step foot inside an ABA-accredited diploma mill. They can easily figure out that it is not worth incurring an additional $150K in NON-DISCHARGEABLE debt, for a chance to enter a declining “profession” is a piss poor investment. They know the score, regarding outsourcing, automation, predictive coding, the rise of flat fees, Biglaw clients moving away from the billable hour, etc.

Cockroach Nicholas Allard of Crooklyn Law School: In his $elf-$erving opinion fluff piece, “The Bar Exam is Not the Best Test of a Good Lawyer,” Allard deposits the following verbal excrement:

“No one who graduates from an A.B.A.-accredited law school with a strong G.P.A. should have to take the bar exam. The current exam is very expensive, and not a great measure of competence to actually practice law.

At Brooklyn Law School — where the performance of graduates on the bar exam is consistently among the highest in New York and the US — we know from years of data that our students who perform well in law school, and get grades within the top 80 percent of their class, will almost always pass the bar. Their high G.P.A.s are more reliable predictors of professional success than their old LSAT scores, though the National Conference of Bar Examiners (N.C.B.E.) asserts the opposite without data.

Our students study exactly what the American Bar Association, the state courts and our faculty require — a process that includes constant testing, grading, calculation of class rank and supervised practical training. So why should our most ready-to-practice graduates, who will pass the bar anyway, spend the time, effort and money ($50,000 to $100,000 or more in lost wages and bar prep courses) on an outdated, unnecessary rite of passage controlled by the powerful N.C.B.E.?” [Emphasis mine]

It’s funny that this rodent NEVER made this case, until after the huge declines in bar passage rates starting in 2014. If he felt that strongly about this arrangement, then he should have argued this point earlier. By the way, does anyone think that another $2,000 for bar prep is more financially burdensome than $124,376.15 in student loans – for a TTT law degree?!?!

The Numbers: On August 25, 2015, Paul Campos posted an LST entry labeled “Has the deline in law school applications bottomed out?” Scroll down to see how easy it has become to gain admi$$ion to ABA schools – in the span of a decade:

“Since the ABA Section of Legal Education saw fit to approve 17 (!) new law schools over the past decade, increasing the number of ABA law schools by nearly 10%, the ratio of total applicants to ABA law schools has declined even more, from 535 to 1 to 262 to 1. Total 1L enrollment this fall, if we assume that last year’s 80% acceptance rate can’t go any higher, will be around 37,200, meaning that first year enrollment will be down 30% from its 2010 peak, despite a sharp drop in admissions standards. Here’s the percentage of applicants admitted to at least one ABA school over the past ten years:

Imagine if it was half that simple to get into medical school or dental school, in this country. Professions are supposed to have real standards, in order to protect practitioners and the general public.

Conclusion: Only law school swine could even pretend to debate the obvious: it is ridiculously easy to get into law school, especially in comparison to medical school or dental school admission requirements. Hell, you can receive a degree from a tiny Bible college, or earn a BA in Film Studies from a party school, and be accepted to a number of ABA toilets. In the final analysis, the pigs will do and say anything – in order to keep the gravy train of federal student loans rolling along. They DO NOT GIVE ONE GODDAMN ABOUT YOU, the student or recent graduate.

"To Akron’s credit, the school performed best of all law schools in the state for first-time bar exam takers this past February with an 83% passage rate. On that exam, Cleveland-Marshall and Case each had first-time passage rates of 64% and 50%."So Akron's 83% is considered good? And CW-according to USNWR the 59 greatest LW in the country-had a pass rate of 50%? For the tuition CW charges that's well beyond outrageous.

Amen from a 25 year veteran. There is no work for even us. There are 91,000 lawyers in Illinois and rising. There is just no work. My buddy had a decent PI practice in the 90s before the flood of graduates. He was in tears the other day when had to ask laws for his kid's tuition payment. The tide of new lawyers will continue to swell because many millennials are manaaging Wal-Marts and Arbys 70 hours per week earning 40K., with no time for holidays and weekends. The choice for them is simple: Earn 40K as a lawyer working 40-50 hours per week or continue on the current path. And you can get into just about any law school with your gubmint loans.

No, you are wrong. There are other options: http://nypost.com/2015/09/20/average-nyc-school-janitor-makes-109k-a-year/.

Law schools and college administrators want to portray the issue as binary: you go to college or you make shit money at Wal-Mart or McDonalds, but that isn't the case. There are loads of high paying municipal jobs throughout the country that require little to no education. People don't pursue them because they aren't prestigious and the media has convinced them that success lies in going to school.

I am not saying that getting these jobs is easy, but I promise you that if your average 3.3 GPA, mid 150s LSAT lemming applied the same effort in getting one of these jobs instead of pursuing higher education, then his/her life would be infinitely better off.

It isn't a choice between school and Walmart; there are plenty of other options when you are 1) young enough to take advantage of them, 2) humble enough to see yourself doing them, and 3) open minded enough to see the bullshit of the alternatives.

" ... managing Wal-Marts and Arbys 70 hours per week earning 40K., with no time for holidays and weekends"

Actually, a store manager would be making more than double that $40K figure you cite (for Walmart, I read that it's $92K on average). A district manager would probably make about as much as your average professional. I'm not suggesting that being a manager is easy work, but at least it does not require taking-on huge student loan debt.

Generally speaking, when I hear about how much money some people in the trades make, it becomes fairly obvious that there is no financial justification for higher education.

Only those people who have achieved entry into the super elite specialties of their professions can justify the education expense.

That is one kind of job, and the books do open up every now and then; what the article means is that the city won't hire a sufficient amount to meet demand (which is true). I promise you though if a motivated kid spends years looking, he'll get something.

My friend spent three years during the height of the recession, and after not getting into police, sanitation, janitorial services, fire, etc., he got into local 1 and parlayed that into a city job. He isMaking very serious money now.

Those jobs are notoriously difficult to obtain, especially if you are neither a female (preference to white females) nor a military veteran. Just look around your government agencies, I've lived in several areas and it's mostly women, and has been for awhile now.

If you are male, trade school is the way to go, but there is also UPS and a few service call type jobs (gas company, electric company, I suppose these might be trades too). Military is fine if you can stomach it, but that's political too and a lot of that is female centered too nowadays.

It's kind of funny though that the work retail insult has gone to college grads now. It used to be the justification to shame high school graduates into college. Now it's to shame college graduates into law school.

The truth of the matter is education was always worthless and meaningless. Even most of high school was completely unnecessary and primarily to line academics' pockets.

There are either jobs or there aren't. The jobs are either protected or they aren't. Anything that needs to get done and can make money will hire, train, and pay people to do it. Anything else has to be subsidized by the government and will generally still result in massive cronyism.

As a 38 year solo, I ask, "How do you work ONLY 40-50 hours to make 40K?" (At least in my first 20 years of practice.)

I worked many 70-80 hour weeks and made less than 40K.

I figure that I worked 22 years at 70 hours a week. A sad reality, but the more I worked, the less time I had to do anything else and spend the money I made.

The LESSON is that if you are a solo, you will have 2 DECADES of sacrifice. Your friends in engineering will be thousands ahead of you in income, and they will have BENEFITS.

In 38 years as an attorney, I have not had $1 in benefits. No pension contribution, no health insurance, no life insurance, no disability insurance, no paid time off (NOT ONE MINUTE), no "Y" days, no dental insurance, no eye insurance, NO VACATION, no paid travel (no plane fare, no food, no hotel costs, etc.). I paid for it all!!! And as I had little to spend, I did little of any of it. I spent nearly 20 years with no health insurance for me an my family trusting we have no problems. I won that bet.

Just before reading this, I read an article in the Washington Post about the lack of intellectual diversity in the Association of American Law Schools. So almost everybody teaching at law school is a liberal. But their liberal principles don't extend to their students. They preach helping the poor but then they create a new class of poor by sadling them with huge debt and no job. Law professors don't care about the poor; they care about lining their own pockets.

Take scamdean Nora Demleitner. According to her wikipedia entry "Demleitner is a self-described liberal Democrat who supports abortion rights and LGBT equality." Yet at Hofstra Demleitner used reverse-robin hooding, deceptive placement figures, and conditional scholarships. Demleitner did everything she could to make her terrible law school look good so she could continue her huge salary. Once she left and Hofstra got an honest dean Hofstra plunged in the us news rankings.

It's easy to pay lip service to causes such as abortion and queer people's rights. Those are mainstream positions that one can endorse without going out on a limb. Scam artist Demleitner deserves no congratulations for adopting those views. She is still a goddamn scamster.

I graduated from a T20 school 10 years ago. I went to an Ivy for undergrad. I got an A in crim law and torts and I got an A- in contracts I and con law I. I made a mistake in civ pro one day. My girlfriend had just broken up with me and I had some other shit going on. So the prof calls on me in class, and I refused to play the Socratic bullshit that day. I remember getting that grade back and seeing a C-. Yep, a C minus. I went over it with my professor and it seemed just as strong as my other essays. I even had someone in the dean's office look at it. They came back the same day and said the professor stands by her grades.

I was naive. I believed the grading was based on the work and that the profs didn't know your number. Get fucking real, people. It's not that hard for a professor to get hold of your number. I mean, there's only about 150 or so people in a class. With sections, it reduces it even more.

That one grade was enough to knock me out of the top 10% of the class and then some. Goodbye any shot at biglaw. Goodbye any chance of summer 1L clerkship. My GPA went from a solid 3.8 down to a 3.4. I graduated in the top 10% of my class, but that doesn't amount to anything. Biglaw cares about your grades after 1st semester or 1st year. I worked in small law for a few years before going back to my old job before law school where I make more money than I did as a lawyer. Who knew a bad day in September of my 1st year of law school would have such an impact.

Ah, the vindictive law professor. Had one of those myself. A's and A-'s throughout 1L, and one C+ because I was absent on the day I was called on because my wife was in hospital.

I quickly saw through the smiling facade those douchebags present. Behind it, they are miserable fuckers who literally ruin lives and seemingly take great delight in playing god. They know grades make or break futures. Piss off a law professor, even over something minor, and you're done.

STAY AWAY FROM THESE SHITHOLES! OUTSIDE HARVARD, YALE AND STANFORD, ALL LAW SCHOOLS ARE FUCKING SCAMS.

I'd say "you've been warned", but nobody listens. We've been warning for a decade now and still the dopey fucking students flock through the law school doors at the start of 1L each year. But at least the students are getting dumber, so we're doing something right. The smart ones are following our good advice: get into Harvard, Yale, or Stanford, or get the fuck out and do something else with your life.

I for one never bought into the blind grading thing. Case in point. I had an ethics professor tell us flat out if we missed more than 3 days of her class (excused or unexcused) our final grade would be docked a full letter. The school was in the ice cold northeast. So lots of going to class sick by everyone.

That's why they take roll in law school. That always struck me as high school nonsense. In college they don't care if you miss class.

Like 10:53 said, class sizes are small and section sizes are even smaller (sometimes no bigger than 50 students). If they want the info it takes the professors about two minutes to find out your examsoft number.

If you fail to get a clerkship or biglaw, your grades do not matter. You can graduate with a 3.2 or a 2.2, and it is all the same thing.

For example, I graduated with a 2.72 from a second tier toilet. After a year of being unemployed, I managed to get a job at a small (toilet) law firm doing (mindless) insurance defense work, but ultimately got my salary up to low 6-figues after about five years.

Now in my 40s, I have been relegated into doing contract work. Obviously, it is cheaper to hire a 20-something to do the mindless work I normally do. Thus, I have decided to go back to school and become a high school science teacher.

There is no hope for me in law, and I don't plan to waste any more time in this awful profession. I RUE THE DAY I WENT TO LAW SCHOOL. I pray I have a more rewarding experience as a teacher, and maybe I can actually help some people in that profession.

True that it is very hard to find work out of Harvard or Yale Law once a lawyer loses a job without immediately moving to another job.

Law is very much a young person's profession.

I think any medical school, even a Caribbean medical school, is a better bet than Harvard, Yale or Stamford Law for those who get medical residencies. Once the doctor gets a residency, pretty much able to work for as long as he or she wants at an okay or even good rate of pay.

Regarding Caribbean medical schools, they are not a safe bet at all anymore (thanks in large part to the advent of physician assistants and nurse practitioners, as well as the growing number of Osteopathic schools in the US). Harvard law and the other top law schools are a much safer bet.

I was in a law school seminar class. We had to draft a statute, then give a presentation on it.After my presentation, the professor pulled me aside and asked "If I wrote the statute?"Clearly it was well-done. I did write it from scratch. Very mathematically oriented and process aware.

Caribean was always a crapshoot, except for the top two schools, only half or less got residencies, much worse outcome than law school grad. also, now that there are more med schools, there are less open residencies (static since 1997 and funded by Congress an d refuses to expand slots). A carbbean med school is dumb at this point.

Also, let's not overlook the tremendous expense of a Caribbean medical school. We're talking $400K+ for tuition and living expense. It's very difficult to recover from that, especially if you can't get into a residency (as most of their graduates now do not).

I once applied for a job as an attorney with a firm of actuaries. (Think of the horror of that-you really have to be smart to become an actuary (I have a son who is trying to become a mechanical engineer. He tells me that the math courses are hard. I took the first 13 credit hours of engineering math as electives. 10 hours of A and 3 hours of B.))

So, I met with the psychologist who was to administer the tests. (I have a BS in psych, split minor in math and chemistry.)

He gave me a series of tests. He would "introduce the test" and then I would take it.

I would give him my answers and he would introduce me to the next test.

One test, he said, was to test my ability to organize.

I smiled.

(Being a psychologist with a rather perverted sense of awareness of victims in his web) He asked "Why are you smiling?"

I said, "I am pretty good at organizing."

He said, "We shall see."

(I KNEW this was going to be historic as I CAN organize anything, precisely.)

I took the test while he scored the test I had just taken previously.

I then gave him my answers to the "organizing" test.

I took the next test and gave him my answers.

HE WAS SMILING. I asked, "Why are YOU smiling?"

"You were right, your score on the organizing test was the highest I have ever seen."

So, Professor Ralph Reisner, University of Illinois School of Law, anytime you want to match wits with me, bring a thousand of your best, and wittiest friends, and GOD, and cross your wicked fingers and pray you will not leave the field of battle unscathed.

One élite law school asked me to undergo an interview, plainly because of my age. Over and over I was asked to prove that I was not too old and demented to succeed in law school. I came damn close to offering to calculate in my head the square root of any twelve-digit number of the interviewer's choice—on the condition that the interviewer find a student half my age to perform the same feat.

Columbia (no 4 law school) is dropping its admissions standards for for 1Ls. Two point drop in 25% LSAT. One point drop in 50% LSAT. Columbia is downright rolling drunk on its massive transfer classes.

Trustees should rein in the law school. Columbia College is number 4 in the nation. Medical and dental schools have much prestige. The law school will drag the university down. Prospective students with high GPAs and LSATs are not going to Columbia any more because they see that it is money grubbing scam, likely to land them worse off than a public school janitor in New York City 20 years down the road.

Several years ago, when I was applying to law schools (more fool I), Columbia sent me an unsolicited fee waiver, solely because of my LSAT score. I concluded that Columbia wasn't so prestigious and desirable as people think. If it were, it wouldn't have to send out junk mail, à la Indiana Tech, just to get people to apply.

There are plenty of ABA law schools that will admit people with 148 LSATs and 2.9 GPAs. Those numbers are shit. And they'll get you into probably 20 or 30 law schools. Maybe more. Ya think maybe just maybe it's too fucking easy to get into law school?

As Nando and Campos (and others) have pointed out, it is essentially open admissions at law schools.

Perhaps it's just me, but complaining about it being too easy to get into law school when you in fact have an open admissions policy seems a tad bit odd, perhaps even a tad bit self-serving, not that anyone in the law school scam/industrial complex would engage in self-serving behavior, mind you.

Hey Nando, I got some off-topic but still interesting news for you: Remember that jackass Jack Marshall with his site EthicsAlarms? Well, he just might have gotten bitch-slapped for some unethical behavior of his own; apparently, one of his blog posts was using someone else's artwork as an illustration without the creator's knowledge or consent. What a hypocrite!

Time to reset expectations guys, the big law days are long gone. Get into the cheapest law school... FAMU, etc, then dive into legal work that helps people -- criminal law. ( I know... legal jobs that help the little guy does not pay as much as big law).

Do a stint as a Certified Legal Intern, then transition to either the PD or Prosecutors office. Learn the ropes, then go private.

The current going rate for misdemeanors is $1500 retainer / $2500 for Felonies. You get to charge a steep billable hourly rate. Worst case you take over flow cases from the PD's office (at a cheaper hourly rate but still doable).

Better advice would be to forego 4-year college and get a protected municipal job. You can make six figures and retire in your 40s and let prestige chasing idiots compete with the slaves of the third world and the domestic labor surplus, while also paying for your pension.

Those are the real smart guys: they partied young, didn't waste time in school, and are going to retire in their forties.

Working as a lawyer, criminal solo, or otherwise,is a fool's errand; however, for idiots who took the plunge, it might be a better of many bad options.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work, either. In most mid to large metro areas, it's almost impossible to get on the "over flow" list, and if you're not on the list, you don't get over flow cases from the PD, period. And not sure where you practice, but except for professional athletes, movie stars, and the few big time drug dealers, nobody will hire you for "steep" hourly rates For you, it's $2500 per felony through trial; if not the client heads to the PD.The jobs in criminal law you describe just don't exist.. There are plenty of lawyers who are willing to do this work-it just doesn't pay.

Right. Try getting that from a MOPE charged with boosting smokes, a steak and a bottle of Captain Morgan at Wallyworld. Even criminal clients are skeptical of paying those rates. The best I can do is get 5 bills per court appearance on a serious felony. Sometimes I get lucky and the big bond is returned to me. It is not steady income.

On September 24, 2015, Pig Ann Althouse of the Univer$ity of Wi$con$in Law Sewer wrote an entry labeled "Is the Bar Too Low to Get Into Law School?" Or: "Why are so many law students failing the bar exam?" Here is the full text of her garbage piece:

“A set of 5 short essays — including one from one of my UW colleagues — published in the NYT. The second question in my post title is the real question the essayists are answering. The first question is only one of the possible answers to that question, but for whatever reason, the NYT decided to use that one as the headline. There has been a drop in the number of applicants to law schools, and that's led schools to taking students with lower LSAT scores. It's not surprising that people scoring lower on one test would also score lower on another test. But the overarching question is whether the standards for becoming a lawyer are too low or too high.

One of the essays, by Nick Allard, the dean of Brooklyn Law School, begins:

No one who graduates from an A.B.A.-accredited law school with a strong G.P.A. should have to take the bar exam. The current exam is very expensive, and not a great measure of competence to actually practice law....

For too long the unregulated monopoly of the testing industry has masqueraded as the self-appointed guardian of professional standards.... It is time for the A.B.A., courts and law schools to take back control of the future of the profession (which they know better than a testing organization) and overhaul the way we evaluate the readiness of graduates to serve in the private and public roles of practicing lawyers.

He doesn't mention Wisconsin, but we're the test case. Look at us. There's no bar exam in Wisconsin for graduates of Wisconsin law schools (that is, my school and Marquette). Are our lawyers worse than your lawyers?”

The hag is being ripped to shreds in her comments section on this post. Scroll down, and look on the right hand side of her blog. You will see that this cockroach has enough time to write 2,785 posts, as of this writing, in 2015. Does anyone with a brain stem want to argue that these “professors” aren’t full of idle time?!?!

On September 22, 2015, American Lawyer re-published a Vivia Chen post for the Careerist, which was entitled “Bar Passage at 27 Year Low.” Check out the portion below:

“You don't have to be very smart to realize that lawyers are getting dumb.

This is math even a six year old could understand: Fewer law school applicants + falling LSAT scores = less qualified lawyers. For at least the last three years, I've been reporting on the decline of the caliber of aspiring lawyers, and the problem isn't getting better. In fact, the profession is officially going down the toilet!

Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but here's the news: Bar passage rates are steadily declining. And, in some states, the fall has been precipitous. Reports BloombergBusiness:

The average score on the multiple-choice portion of the July test fell 1.6 points from the previous year, reaching its lowest level since 1988, according to data provided to Bloomberg by the National Conference of Bar Examiners. The mean score on this summer's exam was 139.9, down from 141.5 in July 2014.

Just in case you missed it: That represents a 27-year low! What's more, rate drops in some states are staggering. Reports Bloomberg:

In Mississippi, the pass rate on the July exam plunged 27 percentage points, from 71 percent in July 2014 to 51 percent this year. In Oklahoma and New Mexico, pass rates slumped 11 percentage points and 12 percentage points, respectively.

What are the "explanations" for the decline besides the obvious one—namely, too many unqualified law grads taking the bar? Last year, when the scores first registered their big drop, some law school deans argued that it was an anomaly because ExamSoft's software malfunctioned, thereby causing difficulty for some students to submit their answers.

And this year's excuse (I mean, "reason")? Some law school members say that the inclusion of a civil procedure section makes the exam unduly difficult. "We have a harder exam so people will get more questions wrong, and that will bring the pass rates down," said Deborah Merritt, a law professor at Ohio State University, to Bloomberg. She added that this will unfairly result in fewer lawyers who can practice.

That kind of explanation won't cut it with Derek Muller, a professor at Pepperdine University School of Law, who's looked closely at this issue on his blog Excess of Democracy. He concludes that the drop in bar passage rates is the result of the steady decline in student quality, noting that many newly opened law schools show especially appalling results. (Check out his blog for some neat charts and graphs.)”

Anyone with a brain stem understands the real reason for the decline in lower bar passage rates, i.e. the law school pigs have dropped their admi$$ion$ “standards” significantly, over the last several years. Only the “educators” are arguing about the cause for this drop. However, they are merely trying to deflect blame and pass the buck onto someone else. It’s what the cockroaches do best.

Thank Christ we have a bar exam to weed out the type of moron that has gone to law school in the past few years. I've known plenty of water heads who passed the bar, and if these people aren't even at that bare minimum level of intellect, they shouldn't practice law.

Kind of off topic, but I'm starting to think that Donald Trump should have founded a law school in lieu of his business or entrepreneur school. I'm sure he could have greased a few palms over at the ABA and had a truly lucrative cash cow with a "prestigious" organization putting him above suspicion.

Being a lawyer, having a son in 3rd year medical radiology residency, I never met a lawyer prior to graduating from law school.My medical student son, has met 30 or 40 practicing physicians, and has been required to "follow them" for several weeks each. Learning both medicine and practice.The "LAW" has no parallel process. And that fact is the "Obscenity of the Law." Law school grads have NO practical experience and are not taught how to practice law.

@10:06 -- there is a very good reason for this difference b/n medical training and legal training.

In medicine, you actually have to diagnose and treat patients. Even the most mundane medical practice requires this basic doctor-patient interaction.

Law, on the other hand, is a massive money-generating scam. Most law school graduates don't actually get to practice "real" law. Most just push paper, which is something any high school graduate with reasonably good organizational skills can do.

Promising young associates will be singled-out by the partners and groomed. Everyone else will just continue to push paper, so no training is really necessary. Thus, why invest in training lawyers?

Medicine is a profession. Similar to other professions, such as engineering, pharmacy, HVAC, carpentry, etc. etc. These are all actual professions, so they hire, train and protect the profession.

Law is like fast food or retail, except a more expensive entry. The workers don't matter and turnover is high, because it's not worth actually paying anyone. The difference though is the glut and debt are so bad, and law has some dumb image of being more than that, that people tell lawyers to start their own firms without money or experience. Even fast food and retail don't tell you "Open your own burger joint/clothing store" because of how ridiculous that advice is.

There are just too many lawyers. The market can only support about 7500 lawyers a year. And of those, probably only 5k are even "good" jobs that could result in an actual career and a decent QOL. But law schools pump out 10x that many grads a year.

Further, a fry cook isn't banned from working in McDonalds if he previously worked at Burger King, so law is even more pathetic.

Whatever, people still enter this lame field. Anyone that went to law school in the last 5 years deserves what they get.

@6:05 -- actually, there is a barrier to entry for the "real" practice of law too. However, it's not the bar exam or law school (as the legal sector pretends).

The real barrier to entry for practicing law (not file review, document review, paper pushing, etc.) is getting a job at biglaw, a federal clerkship or public sector. These are the only ways one can truly become a lawyer.

It used to be an Honor to get into any accredited law school. It was competitive, you needed a 3.4 GPA of better, LSAT score, and letters of Rec. Even Marshall in Chicago, although not selective, it was known as a "flunk out school" if you didn't work hard. It was known for non-traditional students like coppers, divorced Real Estate Agents and older adults. Today, many schools have open admissions and are not selective. Big deal, you got into law school.

Objective

This blog is maintained by a graduate of a third tier law school. My goal is to educate prospective law students about the perils of obtaining a legal education. There are many pitfalls - the debt load, the oversupply of lawyers, the fact that there are not enough legal jobs to satisfy nearly 45,000 annual law graduates, and the reality that the majority of law school graduates will end up with low-paying jobs upon completion of their "legal studies."